WiFi routers from HELL!

About three months ago my trusty Linksys WRT54G gave up the ghost. I came home to find it with all the lights stuck on red and the case almost two hot to the touch.

I panicked and raced to the store and bought the first WiFi router I could find... a D-Link.

(Sometime I'll post about Internet dependency.)

Well, the D-Link was okay, but not the equal of the Linksys. Still, it did what I needed it to do, and I was happy.

Today, I bought a new Linksys router for a friend, and was mentioning it to my next door neighbor. "Do you have WiFi?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"Is the name of your network ____________? I saw that and I knew it had to be you."

"Well, um yeah. I thought I had the SSID disabled, but I guess I didn't."

And I came in and immediately sat down to disable SSID.

If you've taken a laptop into a coffee shop (or at least a Mac into a coffee shop -- I don't know if PCs work the same way), the first time you turn on WiFi it will show you a list of all the WiFi networks within range whose SSIDs are being broadcast.

But you don't have to broadcast your SSID and unless you're running a public WiFi hotspot, you probably shouldn't broadcast it. I became a believer in WiFi security when I was sitting at my computer one evening and noticed my DSL modem light and my router WAN lights flickering even though I wasn't doing anything. It could have been some knucklehead trying to probe my home network from the other side of the router, but it could have also been someone parked on the street downloading or uploading who-knows-what with a laptop using my DSL connection.

I thought my home network name was known only to me and discovered from my neighbor that it was visible to the world.

But as soon as I disabled it, the D-Link locked up and died. Repeated resets did nothing but shift the thing into firmware update mode, which was no improvement.

So, out came the Linksys router which I had purchased for my friend. Unknown to me, some things had changed with the Linksys since I had bought mine a couple of years ago, and not for the better: a new, non-GPL operating system and a steep cut in RAM -- both apparently done to stop third-party developers from enabling features on the WRT54G that Linksys didn't want enabled.

(Sorry. If you're a router geek this is 'way oversimplified and if you're not a router geek it's 'way more than you wanted to know.)

After about 90 minutes of fiddling, I got the new Linksys router working. The web-server based setup is really buggy, which is probably because of whatever the new OS is, and I had to reset, reset, reset and reset again to get it running. Probably eight to ten resets in all.